There are arguably three top issues of 2012 that will play out in Congress and with the Administration that will dominate the agenda, help drive the elections and determine what time is left over to take up the 2012 farm bill. The issues are: Debt Ceiling Congress passed a debt ceiling increase last year along with several budgetary reforms and procedures to reduce the deficit – some more successful (such as a cap on discretionary spending) than others (such as the Super Committee process). Part of the deal to increase the debt limit last August was to allow the President to raise it by another $1.2 trillion this year (from $14.2 trillion to $16.4 trillion) without Congressional approval unless Congress blocks his move...
What You Need to Know Today: Commodities were mostly lower across the board today after yesterday’s Federal Reserve meeting hinted at a potential interest rate hike later in 2026. The dollar index reached its highest level in over a year, and a strong dollar makes U.S. agricultural expor...
Tomorrow is the Juneteenth federal holiday, and the USDA, along with the rest of the federal government and the CME, will be closed, so the monthly Cattle on Feed report was released a day early. The total number of cattle on feed in feedlots with 1,000 head or more capacity on 1 June amounted...
From WPI Consulting
Communicating importance of value-added products
Facing increasing pressure to quantify the value of export promotion efforts to investors, a U.S. industry organization retained WPI to develop a quantitative model that better communicated the importance of exports. The resulting model concluded that value-added meat exports contributed $0.45 cents per bushel to the price of corn, increasing support for that sector’s financial support of WPI’s client. In addition to serving the red meat industry with this type of analysis, WPI has generated similar deliverables for the U.S. soybean and poultry/egg industries.